Mozilla Persona is not just "log in with [big web
company]" with a better logo. It's different, and
way, way, better. If you're still complaining
about the web login problem, you probably just
don't understand Mozilla Persona well enough.

The BrowserID protocol never leaks tracking
information back to the Identity Provider.

So you can use your @example.com email addres to log in
to whatever sites you like, and example.com never knows
which ones.

If your site login method is based on “let’s
make users remember complex strings of text, which
we know people are really bad at” or “let’s
depend on having our users tracked by big companies,
which we know people hate” you need to take a short
hacking break. Make a simple web application that
uses Mozilla Persona, learn how excellent it is,
and then never go back.

Bonus link: OAuth
of Fealty by Ian Bogost. The short truth
is this: Facebook doesn't care if developers can use
the platform easily or at all.

And Mozilla would never do anything like that, right?
(Seriously. Please don't. Mozilla Persona fanboy
here—if you mess it up I'll look like the web
authentication version of Zune Tattoo Guy.)

So why have we as an industry failed
on First and Fourth Amendment protections? Because
we're not doing some basic political tasks that the Second
Amendment crew is doing right.

Fan-friendly vintage products
Firearms sellers understand and use the endowment
effect. For example, users
are happily keeping and using M1911
pistols, based on a century-old design by John
Browning. And even buying newly manufactured
ones. When Grandpa goes to the store for a vintage
product like he's used to, he can get one, not a forced
upgrade to flat design.

Should IT companies devote valuable staff to
maintaining vintage versions? Not necessarily. The largest
producer of M1911 pistols is a company called
Kimber, founded more than 50 years
after Browning's death.
It's hard to imagine a IT company throwing an old
product over the wall instead of killing it. The
conventional wisdom is to do everything possible to
prevent competition with old versions. But now that
the market is mature, we can reconsider that.
Keep the fangirls and fanboys happy, and they'll be writing letters
to Congress instead of THIS NEW VERSION
SUX0RZ!!1! rants.

The results of that quarter-to-quarter thinking are coming
home to roost. Pursuit of lock-in
can be great for sales, short-term, but locked-in
users can't switch vendors as
fast, which makes every vendor's OODA
loop unnecessarily slow. Thanks to the decision to
pursue
lock-in, we've gone from
innovation to stagnation and squabbling, and just
making
everyone rebuild their stuff over and over
for different
platforms.
Meanwhile, the firearms
business is letting users swap in independently
developed parts while keeping their platform
investments. It's news
when an IT person makes noise about We
do not break userspace! but mature markets take
that for granted.
<pullquote>The
IT industry isn't a baby any more. So it's time
to stop raising it on the steroids of forced
upgrades and the crack of lock-in, and move it
up to the whole-wheat goodness of sustained customer
value.</pullquote> Worst pull quote ever.
You're
basically saying that you'd give steroids and
crack to a baby. Also, gluten moms. —Ed.

Product-membership bundling
The Second Amendment industries have the
NRA, and we've got the
EFF. Even accounting for the fact that the NRA is
a century older, the EFF is relatively small compared
to the user population it serves.

IT vendors could easily add EFF membership to product
and service bundles. Yes, the EFF does call out
some vendors on problematic programs, but see stick
together on the basics above. As the industry grows
up, we'll be putting less and less importance on
infighting, and more on staying in business for the
long term.

Conclusion With the Second
Amendment safe for the foreseeable future, and firearms
vendors sitting on more orders than they can
fill, (thanks largely to NRA publicity—that
product-membership bundling was worth it, wasn't
it?) a lot of Marketing and Public Policy people
there are probably getting a little bored. Time for
the IT business to hire some.

Here's an opportunity you don't see every day.
Send Joey
Hess $300 and he'll work with you to set up
the best possible git-annex system to meet your
needs. Git-annex is software to sync your files to
multiple devices, including computers and phones,
along with keeping your stuff up to date on your
backup drives and cloud services.

Git-annex gives you a lot of options. Just as
Dropbox isn't tied to one platform, git-annex
isn't tied to one platform or to one service.
You can sync your files to dropbox.com or to a
long list of other services. Or use your own
server, or use external hard drives. Here's an
opportunity to get help figuring out how to make it
work for your own projects.

No, [Linux] doesn’t have an official reference platform,
not even whatever PC Linus happens to be using these
days. But for developer workstations, there’s a
de-facto reference platform, and it’s called a
ThinkPad. If you’ve been using Linux for any length of
time you know that if you want a linux desktop machine
to Just Work, you buy a ThinkPad. There is a
self-reinforcing cycle that perpetuates this
phenomenon. Linux developers tend to use ThinkPads, so
they tend to make sure that the hardware is well
supported, so Linux developers tend to buy more
ThinkPads, and so on. I don’t know where it started,
but that’s how it works.

My understanding is that espionage means giving secret
or classified information to the enemy. Since Snowden
shared information with the American people, his
indictment for espionage could reveal (or confirm) that
the US Government views you and me as the enemy.

Why do people believe bullshit? The problem of
producing it is covered in Harry G. Frankfurt's On
Bullshit, but why believe it?

It looks as if believing an organization's bullshit
is an inexpensive way to signal loyalty to the
organization. Signaling through contribution requires
skill×effort. Believing bullshit requires
little effort and there's no multiplier for skill.

Although signaling loyalty through bullshit-belief
can be a good strategy for a member, there are
clearly adverse consequences for the organization.
The organization fails to capture extra, potentially
useful, work done as a by-product of loyalty signaling
through contribution. Ineffective managers within
the organization can manage based on loyalty as
shown through bullshit-belief rather than having
to evaluate results. And members make incorrect
decisions based on bullshit, not reality.

The obvious answer is for the organization to produce
less bullshit. Most of the time, the decision to
believe something isn't based on what belief is
correct, but on what belief shows loyalty. If the
bullshit isn't there, the opportunity to believe
it is gone. However, much as it would help to have
fewer opportunities for members to signal loyalty by
bullshit-belief, the organization may need to continue
to produce bullshit for other reasons.

A more realistic answer is to give members
opportunities for showing loyalty that do not require
either effort, which is costly, or bullshit-belief,
which is harmful. For example, provide silly-looking
clothing for members—anything that people would
choose to wear only to show loyalty, and not for other
reasons. Or invite members to participate in rituals,
as in agile software development methodologies.

George Simpson: I have spent the better part
of the last 15 years defending cookie-setting
and tracking to help improve advertising. But
it is really hard when the prosecution
presents the evidence, and it has ad industry
fingerprints all over it -- every time. in Suicide
By Cookies (via Doc
Searls Weblog and Mozilla
Privacy Blog)

Joshua Koran: The
Real Costs of Cookie-Blocking. This
inadvertently centralizes consumer activity to just a
few players, which according to privacy advocates would
help lead to the very "Big Brother" centralized
database of consumer activity that they are trying to
prevent.

Rebecca Waber: When
Ads Get (Too) Personal. As media — and
the advertising seen on it — become more focused
on smaller groups of individuals, we see less of
the same advertising content as other people do. And
that's a potential blow to advertisers for several
important reasons:....

Richard Stacy: Why
social media is a dangerous concept. Social
media only really works on the basis of speaking to
small groups of people or individuals. It hardly ever
gives you the scale or reach we assume is associated
with the term media.

Alan Schulman: Algorithms
Don't Feel, People Do. This balance between
medium and message has largely been lost, as we seem
more seduced by the algorithms — the containers and
software solutions for delivering messages to devices
— than the evolution or effectiveness of them.

Dax Hamman: Why
retargeting is fundamentally broken. Do we not
recognize that all that advertising we see in
magazines, on TV or hear on the radio is influencing
our decisions? And yet under the digital model of last
touch, all of that value and influence is simply
ignored.

Steve Smith: Is
'Do Not Track' And Opt-Out Already Impacting Audience
Value And Pricing?The report contends that
this increase in the share of users either without
cookies or without third-party data is likely a
result of enhanced public awareness of do-not-track
and opt-out mechanisms. As browsers like Mozilla’s
Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer make
the do-not-track flag or cookie blocking the default
modes,this share is likely to rise.

Mary Hodder and Elizabeth Churchill: Lying
and Hiding in the Name of Privacy. A large
percentage of individuals employ artful dodges to
avoid giving out requested personal information online
when they believe at least some of that information
is not required. These dodges include hiding personal
details, intentionally submitting incorrect data,
clicking away from sites or refusing to install phone
applications. This suggests most people do not want
to reveal more than they have to when all they want
is to download apps, watch videos, shop or participate
in social networking.

Dan Hon: 2p
– The tyranny of digital advertising.
Ultimately, digital display advertising is boring
and suffers from a glut of oversupply. This is why we
have a pseudo holy war going on between the display
advertising folk and the native advertising folk:
because people ignore interruptive display advertising
and pay attention to interesting content.

Mozilla Blog: Personalization
with Respect. Mozilla aspires to enable
personalization—the customization of ads, content,
recommendations, offers and more — that doesn’t
rely on the user being in the dark about who has
access to that information, and with whom that
information is shared.

Ken Doctor: The
newsonomics of climbing the ad food chain.
Publishers describe their digital ad woe
with these terms: “price compression,”
“bargain-basement ad networks,” and “death
of the banner ad.” Each describes a world
of hyper-competition in digital advertising
— a world of almost infinite ad possibility
and unyielding downward pricing pressure. (via Street
Fight)